Mere Apologetics by Alister E. McGrath

Author:Alister E. McGrath
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Apologetics, REL067030
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

Now this is not really an argument for the existence of God, in the strict sense of the term. For a start, we would need to expand Lewis’s point to include the Christian declaration that God either is, or is an essential condition for, the satisfaction of the natural human desire for transcendent fulfillment. Yet even then, this is not an argument to be understood as a deduction of God’s existence.

Yet Lewis saw this line of thought as demonstrating the correlation of faith with experience, exploring the “empirical adequacy” of the Christian way of seeing reality with what we experience within ourselves. It is not deductive, but—to use Peirce’s term once again—abductive. Lewis clearly believes the Christian faith casts light upon the realities of our subjective experience. Augustine of Hippo wove the central themes of the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption into a prayer: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”[96] Lewis reaffirms this notion, and seeks to ground it in the world of human experience, which he believes it illuminates.

Lewis thus contends that Christian apologetics must engage with this fundamental human experience of “longing” for something of ultimate significance. The Christian faith interprets this as a clue toward grasping the true goal of human nature. Just as physical hunger points to a real human need that can be met through food, so this spiritual hunger corresponds to a real need that can be met through God. Lewis argues that most people are aware of a deep sense of longing within them that cannot be satisfied by anything transient or created: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[97]

Now this proves nothing. After all, I might have a deep desire to meet a golden unicorn. But that doesn’t mean unicorns—whether golden or not—actually exist. That’s not Lewis’s point. Christianity, he points out, tells us that this sense of longing for God is exactly what we should expect, since we are created to relate to God. It fits in with a Christian way of thinking, thus providing indirect confirmation of its reliability. There is a strong resonance between theory and observation—between the theological framework and the realities of our personal experience.

So how can this approach be developed and applied apologetically? Its essential feature is an appeal to human experience—to the subjective world of feelings, rather than to objective analysis of the natural world. Yet these subjective experiences are important to people, not least because people feel they are deeply significant. Not everyone recognizes this kind of experience when it is described; nevertheless, its presence is sufficiently widespread to act as the basis for an important apologetic strategy. Three points need to be made about this approach.

This approach connects with a shared human experience. It engages with something that resonates with many people, offering an explanation of a feeling that many have had and wondered what it meant.

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